As Linch suggests, opportunities that seem promising but aren’t sufficiently legible can be referred to other funders to investigate.
We reached out to staff at Open Philanthropy about setting up this fund, and received positive feedback. The EA Funds team (with input from LTFF grant managers at the time) had also previously considered setting up a “Legible Longtermism Fund” — my understanding is the reason they didn’t was due to lack of capacity, but they were in favour of the idea.
Whether the best opportunities are sufficiently legible is an interesting question:
It may depend on whether you look at it in terms of cost-effectiveness, or total benefit:
In pure cost-effectiveness terms:
I think I may share your intuitions that some of the smaller grants the Long-Term Future Fund makes might be more cost-effective than the typical grant I expect the Longtermism Fund to make (though, it’s difficult to evaluate this in advance of the Longtermism Fund making grants!).
Though, we anticipate the Longtermism Fund’s requirement for legibility might, in some cases, be beneficial to cost-effectiveness. For example, we anticipate some organisations to prefer receiving grants from the Longtermism Fund (as it’s democratically funded and highly legible) than other funders. Per his comment, Caleb (from EA Funds) and a reviewer from OP share this view.
In total benefit terms:
My intuition, informed by just double-checking Open Phil’s and FTX FF’s respective grants databases, is that a significant amount of longtermist grantmaking goes to work that would be sufficiently legible for this fund to support.
There therefore seems to me to be plenty of sufficiently legible work to support.
My bottomline view is the effect of the fund will be to:
Increase the total amount of funding going to longtermist work. This may be especially important if longtermism manages to scale up significantly and funding requirements increase (e.g., successful megaprojects).
Changing the proportion of funding to legible/illegible opportunities provided by individual donors/large funders (i.e., the proportion of funding going to legible work provided by individual donors will increase).
Provide a funder that may be favourable to grantees who want to be funded by something democratically supported/highly legible.
I don’t think it’s ‘screening off’ opportunities that don’t fit meet its legibility requirement will make it more difficult for those organisations to receive funding.
Worth noting that I’m speaking as a Researcher at GWWC, whereas Longview is primarily responsible for grantmaking.
Provide a funder that may be favourable to grantees who want to be funded by something democratically supported/highly legible.
FWIW this is the most exciting ToC to me. In general (and speaking very coarsely) I think grantmakers should be optimizing to identify new vehicles to allow more great grants to be given, rather than e.g. better evaluations or improvements of existing opportunities, or fundraising.
Thanks for your questions!
As Linch suggests, opportunities that seem promising but aren’t sufficiently legible can be referred to other funders to investigate.
We reached out to staff at Open Philanthropy about setting up this fund, and received positive feedback. The EA Funds team (with input from LTFF grant managers at the time) had also previously considered setting up a “Legible Longtermism Fund” — my understanding is the reason they didn’t was due to lack of capacity, but they were in favour of the idea.
Whether the best opportunities are sufficiently legible is an interesting question:
It may depend on whether you look at it in terms of cost-effectiveness, or total benefit:
In pure cost-effectiveness terms:
I think I may share your intuitions that some of the smaller grants the Long-Term Future Fund makes might be more cost-effective than the typical grant I expect the Longtermism Fund to make (though, it’s difficult to evaluate this in advance of the Longtermism Fund making grants!).
Though, we anticipate the Longtermism Fund’s requirement for legibility might, in some cases, be beneficial to cost-effectiveness. For example, we anticipate some organisations to prefer receiving grants from the Longtermism Fund (as it’s democratically funded and highly legible) than other funders. Per his comment, Caleb (from EA Funds) and a reviewer from OP share this view.
In total benefit terms:
My intuition, informed by just double-checking Open Phil’s and FTX FF’s respective grants databases, is that a significant amount of longtermist grantmaking goes to work that would be sufficiently legible for this fund to support.
There therefore seems to me to be plenty of sufficiently legible work to support.
My bottomline view is the effect of the fund will be to:
Increase the total amount of funding going to longtermist work. This may be especially important if longtermism manages to scale up significantly and funding requirements increase (e.g., successful megaprojects).
Changing the proportion of funding to legible/illegible opportunities provided by individual donors/large funders (i.e., the proportion of funding going to legible work provided by individual donors will increase).
Provide a funder that may be favourable to grantees who want to be funded by something democratically supported/highly legible.
I don’t think it’s ‘screening off’ opportunities that don’t fit meet its legibility requirement will make it more difficult for those organisations to receive funding.
Worth noting that I’m speaking as a Researcher at GWWC, whereas Longview is primarily responsible for grantmaking.
FWIW this is the most exciting ToC to me. In general (and speaking very coarsely) I think grantmakers should be optimizing to identify new vehicles to allow more great grants to be given, rather than e.g. better evaluations or improvements of existing opportunities, or fundraising.
Thanks Michael!